ON THE AMENDMENT TO BEBEL’S RESOLUTION AT THE STUTTGART CONGRESS[1]

Written:Written in December 1916Published:Published in December 1916 inSbornik Sotsial-DemokrataNo. 2.

      Printed from the original.

      Signed:N. Lenin.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1971,

      Moscow,Volume 36,

      page415.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
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Iremember very well that the final drafting of this
amendment was preceded by prolonged negotiations directly
between ourselves and Bebel. The first draft made a much more
straightforward statement about revolutionary agitation
and revolutionary action. We showed it to Bebel; he replied:
I don’t accept it, because then the Public Prosecutor will
dissolve our party organisations, and we can’t have that,
as there are no serious developments as yet. After
consultation with legal specialists and numerous redraftings of the
text in order to give legal expression to the same idea, a
final formula was found which Bebel agreed to accept.

[1]Areference to the amendments to Bebel’s resolution on
anti-militarism tabled at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second
International, held from August 18 to 23, 1907. Bebel’s resolution
had the basic defect of failing to state the active tasks of the
proletariat, which gave the opportunists (Vollmar and others) an
opportunity of reading it their own way. Accordingly, on behalf
of the Russian and Polish delegations, Rosa Luxemburg motioned
amendments to Bebel’s resolution which were signed by Lenin.
They =

1) said that militarism was the chief instrument of class
oppression; =

2) stated the task of carrying on agitation among the
youth, and =

3) emphasised the task of Social-Democrats not only
to struggle against the outbreak of wars or for the earliest halt to
wars, but also use the wartime crisis to speed the downfall of the
bourgeoisie. =

All these amendments were in the main included
in Bebel’s resolution and adopted by the Congress. For details,
see Lenin’s articles “The International Socialist Congress in
Stuttgart” (present edition, Vol. 13, pp. 75–81 and 82–93).